Financial market participants, whether they are research analysts, portfolio managers, traders, brokers or private investors, are dependent upon data and information to make informed investment decisions and manage risk. Information is the critical raw material of the global financial markets. The providers of this information are members of the market data industry, which as of the end of 2003, represented $6.7 billion in revenue. Such information typically includes event related data, which may be any information that is likely to effect the valuation of one or more securities.
The most comprehensive financial market systems for the monitoring and management of financial market related data and information are provided by Bloomberg LP, Reuters Ltd., and Thomson Financial (a division of the Thomson Corporation). FactSet Research Systems, Inc. may be considered a fourth major player in this market. Together, these companies represent over 90% of the global revenues in the market data industry. Such information providers have earned a significant share of the market data industry because they each control the sources of the data and content, as well as the technical platforms to capture, store and distribute such data and content. There are many other smaller companies that provide subsets of the data, information and content.
To make this data useful to users, some of the information providers have designed specific user interfaces, sometimes referred to as visual metaphors, to “amplify” and/or improve cognition. Some of these interfaces specifically address the presentation of event-related data. One basic example of a visual metaphor for events is a calendar. This makes some sense because events are highly time-sensitive. Another example of an event presentation method is a standard security price chart with the capability to overlay a single category of events, which are marked by a symbol (usually an arrow or a letter). This method is similar to a timeline.
However, due to the massive number of unique events in financial market systems, the calendar template is unable to display more than a few different types of events without becoming cluttered, thereby rendering it nearly useless to the user. The timeline method fails for the same reason. In short, none of the existing “visual metaphors” or user interfaces adequately capture and organize the breadth of relevant event data in a way that it can be easily understood and absorbed by the user. Therefore, despite the sophistication of some known market data platforms, users may still resort to manually creating “catalyst calendars” and events lists using tools, such as Microsoft Excel, a whiteboard, or pencil and paper.